


The Time That Follows

by gooseclaws



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Canon Compliant, F/F, Grief/Mourning, It's a love story, and i just wanted to help her through it i guess, i saw myself in jamie, it's a ghost story, not so much a fix-it as an attempt at closure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:33:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27165955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooseclaws/pseuds/gooseclaws
Summary: In the days and in the months and in the years that follow, Jamie searches for Dani.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 7
Kudos: 94





	The Time That Follows

In the days that follow, the gardener searches for her love.

She steps into their home for the first time since Dani left, empty-handed and empty-hearted, and stands in the doorway for what feels like ages. Darkness pools in every corner, and her fingers scrabble for the lightswitch, but she doesn’t flip it. She waits. She listens. Wind-lashed branches patter against the window. Something rattles and clanks in one of the walls, a pipe that probably needs fixing that no one has bothered to fix. Her heart catapults itself against her ribs, again and again, beating itself senseless against the walls in grief.

Within the apartment, there’s nothing. No creaking floorboards. No cabinet doors banging at a time some would consider rude. No faint murmur of the television. Nothing that Jamie can catch and keep and use to trick herself into believing that Dani is still here. That Jamie herself never raced across the Atlantic to the place where it all began. That she isn’t wearing the same dried-stiff shirt and jeans she wore when she waded into the lake and asked to die.

There’s nothing. The apartment is empty, except for the memories she left behind.

She turns on the light and crosses the threshold into reality.

Alone, she undresses. Alone, she brushes her teeth. Alone, she stands at the foot of the bed, and stares down at the twin impressions of their bodies pressed into the mattress. For thirteen years, they slept side-by-side, sinking deeper into the mattress and deeper in love.

Jamie rounds the bed and stands at Dani’s side. She bends down and lays a hand on Dani’s spot. She wonders when she last slept on the left side of a bed, and wonders at her wondering over something so mundane.

The memory comes easy. It was at Bly, in Dani’s room. Their first night together, before they really knew each other, after they realized they seemed to have known each other all their lives. Before they’d twined their lives together like vines climbing the same trellis.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how much of building a life together is hammering out these little routines. My side of the bed. Your seat at the counter. Our carefully negotiated method of organizing the fridge. We settle into them, don’t we? We barely even think about it, because it means we have more time for the important things. Things like laying awake on work nights, talking about everything and nothing just to hear our lover’s voice. Spending months deciding on the perfect gift for someone who never asks for anything. Learning each other’s bodies until it seems like we know them better than we know our own.

They’d known it wouldn’t last, hadn’t they? Hadn’t they talked about it? And yet they’d built their lives on top of each other anyway, Dani supporting Jamie, Jamie supporting Dani. Except, in the end, Jamie hadn’t been enough, had she? So maybe this is only fair, she thinks. Maybe this is what she deserves: to stand beside a bed that had been theirs, her fingers brushing the spot that had been  _ hers _ , and know that it’s all about to crumble away.

She climbs into bed, claiming Dani’s spot, filling the space Dani used to fill. She finds Dani there, in the pillow, in the sheets. She breathes the fragrance of her shampoo, the earth of her skin, the salt of her sweat. Jamie presses her face into the pillow and breathes deep, and for a moment it seems as though Dani is there, holding Jamie close, sighing as Jamie burrows into her.

But when Jamie lifts her arms to wrap around Dani, to anchor them together, there’s nothing. Just cold night air and the starlit ghosts of furniture.

So Jamie pulls her knees to her chest, curls in on herself, and weeps.

When she sleeps—and she does, eventually, drained dry of tears by grief and guilt and pain that reaches deeper than the roots of the most ancient trees—she dreams of Dani.

The dream slips away when she wakes, and she remembers, all over again, what she’s lost.

* * *

The gardener’s search stretches on for months.

She’s followed dead-end after dead-end. The scent of Dani in their sheets: lost in the wash. The sound of her voice: trapped on an answering machine that Jamie discarded in a fit of madness she regrets more than anything. Her smile, her eyes, the way she moved: preserved in deteriorating video tape and yellowing photos, simulacra of the real thing.

It helps. It does help, except when it hurts Jamie so bad she can’t breathe, when she finds herself on the floor in front of the TV with a bottle of something strong and a wail in her throat like shards of glass.

But none of it is Dani. Not really. It’s not even her ghost.

It isn’t enough.

So she walks. Just like the lady in the lake, Jamie wakes and Jamie walks, all over the town they’d come to call home. It isn’t that simple, of course; Jamie knows—but doesn’t totally believe—that she’s still alive and probably should stay that way, so in between her walks, her days are filled with managing the flower shop and ignoring calls from Owen and all the little things you have to do to keep a body going.

Sometimes, she thinks, she could just... not. When it’s bad, really bad, food and friends and finances seem optional. Because what’s the worst that could happen? She dies, and there’s nothing after, and she doesn’t see Dani again? Isn’t that her life right now?

But the voice in her head that isn’t entirely hers says, “Dani wouldn’t want that.” And  _ dammit _ , she thinks,  _ dammit, Dani, you’re not here anymore to want things, this isn’t fair _ but  _ right _ isn’t always  _ fair _ so she eats and keeps herself clean and keeps the shop open enough and profitable enough that the bedrock of her life is stable at a minimum.

Then she walks.

It’s aimless at first. There’s too much in her head and it fills her until she’s ready to burst, her muscles twitching and her skin about to crawl away and leave her behind. She walks to bleed some of that wild energy off. She walks until she knows the town like the back of her hand.

Eventually, her walks lead her to the water.

The lake in their town is enormous, an ocean to Bly’s pond. And to be fair to the lake, it isn’t in their town so much as the town is a supplicant kissing the water’s hem. It’s unavoidable, unless you’re Dani Clayton, and then you can live thirteen years on its shore without once dipping a toe in its waters.

Maybe it was weird that they’d settled there. Jamie thinks about this, barefoot in the shallows of a lake she’s just met. She only thinks about it for a moment, because like every thought these days, it leads her to Dani, and there is no subject she knows as well as her wife. The answer is as clear as can be: Dani had wanted to settle here because it forced her to be vigilant.

And if she was vigilant, if she built up her defenses, then maybe, when the time came, she’d be able to resist.

It hadn’t worked that way. You know. You remember. There’s no inoculation against the kind of demon Dani fought.

Jamie wriggles her toes in the rocky sand and tries not to think about battles lost. She thinks instead of the moments in-between. The sun sets, melting over the waves, and it reminds her of so many nights they shared. Nights with the windows open and the crisp, clean air flowing in. Nights with a bottle of wine only half drunk before they start getting half clothed. Nights with her hands and her mouth and her heart full of Dani and the great and growing love between them.

Jamie can’t look anymore. She dips her head, to wipe away her tears and the memories threatening to rip her apart.

She gasps.

Something shimmers in the water, just beside her own reflection. Blond hair. The curve of a familiar pair of lips.

She drops to her hands and knees before she knows what she’s doing, splashing and pawing at the place she saw Dani as if she can catch her and keep her if she’s fast enough. Sand and rocks and hope sift through her fingers. She’s losing her again. She’s losing her all over again.

Jamie stills. Wiping her hair from her forehead with her wet hand, she stands. Backs away from the lake. And despite knowing what she’ll see, she glances over her shoulder.

Nothing.

But as she looks at the lake again, she wonders. It’s easy to chalk the moment up to her mind, fractured by grief. It’s easy to assume she made it up. But ghosts are real, and none so real as the one who robbed her of Dani. Dani saw the lady in reflections, in water and wine and metal, so who’s to say Jamie can’t see Dani the same way?

So Jamie stuffs her wet feet back into her shoes and beats a quick retreat, hurrying down the streets until she finds her shop and her home above it. She plugs and fills both sinks and the bathtub, then collapses on the tile beneath her knees. She leans her head on the edge of the tub as one hand drifts over the surface of the water, every movement an invitation, a summoning, a prayer.

Jamie falls asleep, curled beside the tub. In the morning, she wakes and drains the water, watching as it swirls away. Most nights, she’ll manage to fall asleep in her bed, all the doors in her home cracked. But she’ll never again sleep without a sink filled nearby; without making her plea, every night, for Dani to return.

* * *

In the years that follow... well, you know that stubborn gardener too well, don’t you, to think she ever stopped searching?

Jamie’s gray hairs are fruitful and multiply. She hardly notices new ones, but every so often, she realizes how much grayer she is. How many more lines score her skin. She tries to imagine Dani, gray and wrinkled beside her, but the images she conjures are only ever visions of her wife as she knew her. Even then, she begins to fade, the details of her beautiful face smudged and fuzzy around the edges. It’s too much like the lady of the lake, and it scares her more than anything since the loss that tore her open from the inside. Jamie loses hours to the photographs of Dani she keeps around the apartment, trying to preserve as much of her as she can.

Maybe that’s why she’s never been able to date again. Her life is too much of a shrine to the woman she lost and loves still. It’s not like she hasn’t tried, either. Age sharpens her beauty. Loneliness tempers it. More than one woman finds herself drawn toward the lovely woman with the haunted eyes.

Do you know why? Did you ever wonder? I think they saw how much love she had to give, even if she liked to pretend otherwise. I think they saw how much she wanted to dedicate her life to someone. Too bad for them, I guess. That ship sailed long before they got there.

Jamie does try to find someone new. She reminds herself that Dani would have wanted her to. Dani told her as much. Jamie was so rarely willing to acknowledge the possibility of a life after  _ them _ , but at the time, she only smiled and said, “no guarantees, love, but I’ll try. If that’s what you want.” And when the time comes, she’s as good as her word. She dresses up, meets them for drinks or for dinner, and sometimes she feels the edges of an  _ almost _ between them. A could have been. The ghost of possibility.

Her life is so full of ghosts. Just not the one she wants.

No one ever takes her on a second date. She realizes, after the third or fourth woman she disappoints, that as lonely as she is, the void can’t be filled by just any woman with a warm smile and a gentle touch. The hole at the center of her is shaped, precisely, like Dani. How could anyone else ever fill it?

After all, wasn’t she alone in the beginning? Before Dani came to Bly, crying and power-walking her way into Jamie’s life with bad tea and the biggest heart she’d ever known. Before Dani, Jamie had only her flowers and occasional company. Couldn’t that be enough again?

So she runs the flower shop, and smiles and laughs with her regulars. She becomes a regular around town in turn. And now and again, when that isn’t quite enough, she calls Owen.

They spend their time playing catch-up, mostly. The basic structure of their lives doesn’t change much between calls—he has his restaurant, and she has her shop—but the world around them does. The little used bookstore down the street changes hands. Owen’s thinking of renovating. Flora’s getting married.

Jamie’s shocked. “Isn’t she... what, seventeen or so?” she asks.

“She’s almost thirty,” says Owen, gently, and Jamie can’t help herself. She counts the years.

Twenty.

Twenty years since they met. Twenty years since they fell in love. Thirteen years together, and seven without.

Those first thirteen years flew by. These last seven have been the longest of her life.

Of all the ways she’s searched for Dani, nothing hurts more than finding the outline of her in the places where she’s missing. Nothing hurts more than looking back at a life and observing the black holes where light should be. Seven years without, Jamie thinks. Seven years robbed.

She spends the time leading up to Flora’s wedding in a perpetual temper, worse than any since the very early days. Everything sets her off. The shop. Her home. The water. Seven years searching for Dani, and suddenly she’s everywhere. She’s there in seven years of terrible dinners cooked without comment. Seven years of mornings weathered alone. Seven years of compliments never given, secret smiles never shared, seven years ripped away because of some fucking ghost in some fucking pond.

The night before she gets on a plane to California, she fills the sink, as she always does. She fills the tub, as she always does. But in a change, in a deviation from seven years’ worth of coping mechanisms and habit, she strips to nothing and steps into the bath.

She hisses as she sinks into the coldest water she could coax from the tap, goosebumps prickling up her arms. When she settles, she looks down. Her legs stretch out beneath her, blurred in the rippling water, and her own face glares back. Jamie eases closer, until her nose touches the water, until she’s just about kissing the surface. 

She plunges in.

She screams.

Her screams are nothing like words. Nothing like coherent thought. She just howls, seven years of loss and thirteen years of fear tearing through her like a hurricane. The sound bubbles in her mouth and gurgles in her ears, high and watery.

She wonders if Dani can hear it.

She hopes she does, and she’s afraid she does, too.

When it’s all gone, when she’s wrung herself dry and squeezed every molecule of air from her lungs, she thinks about breathing in. Letting her lungs fill there, shriveled up in a bathtub in their home.

She stops herself. Just barely.

Jamie bursts through the surface of the water, panting and spluttering, and flips the drain with slippery hands before she can second guess herself. As the water recedes and circles the grate with a bubbling roar, she waits, hands braced on the porcelain, shivering in the stark air. She doesn’t know how long she waits. She just knows, when her breathing slows and her teeth start to chatter, that she’s done.

It’s over.

Hauling herself out of the tub, she dries herself off, her mind blank save for the warm, soft sensation of the towel on her skin. Her bed calls to her. She’s halfway out the door when she stops. She turns. She refills the tub.

Hot water, this time. It’ll cool quickly, but if Dani does come... well, better to make things as nice for her as she can.

It’s the least she can do.

The sheets welcome her, warm and soft from years of use. She takes up her spot, the right side of the bed, and nestles in. One hand rests on the empty mattress beside her.

As she falls asleep, she knows: there’s one thing she has left to do. One last rock unturned.

She has a story to tell.

* * *

You said it was a ghost story. You were wrong about that.

You said it wasn’t your story, and you know what? You were wrong about that, too.

It was our story, Jamie. It was always ours.

**Author's Note:**

> i saw a lot of myself and my wife in jamie and dani. in good ways and in terrifying ways. this started out as a way for me to process the avalanche of feelings i had at the end of watching the show, and ended up being a way for me to stay by jamie's side as she mourned.
> 
> totally un-betaed, mostly un-edited, but it was a labor of love all the same. thanks for reading
> 
> [edit 16feb2021: i cut the whole last section of this. i like the little coda better as an ending. but if you come back to this and you're like, "hey, i liked that whole section with ghost dani" and you want to read it again, please reach out here or on twitter and i'll send you the pdf of the original.]
> 
> i'm on twitter occasionally posting cat photos and bad jokes [@gooseclaws](https://twitter.com/gooseclaws)


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